Ram memory

[Dryden]

There are processes and applications that run all the time you can disable that can free up resources, but only do that if you know what you're doing. You can shut off a process that Windows needs to remain open and, well, you can guess what will happen. If I get a chance tomorrow, I'll provide a list of things that XP always has running that aren't necessary and are absolute memory hogs. Shutting these off is not permanent. They will restart when the PC does on a fresh boot. You'd only be shutting them off for that session.

I'll add that Microsoft Outlook can singlehandedly bring a Windows machine to its knees, especially after you've done an email composition which will cause Outlook to TSR Microsoft Word into memory. Outlook/Winword is a bane on my company, but it does provide me solid job security.

 

[CleveBucks]

If you have Automatic Updates enabled, it will absolutely hog your CPU for at least a few minutes after logging on. You'll see wuauclt.exe and one of the svchost.exe processes just going wild. Near 100% CPU and over 100 MB RAM in use by those processes. Eventually they realize no new updates are necessary and settle down.